Universities Weblog

In about 40 hours or so, the biggest football game of the year will be played. It's not the BCS's national title match-up. It's the Harvard-Yale game. And this year the two teams play for the Ivy League title, since neither has lost a conference game…

Harvard has two losses - to Holy Cross and to Lehigh, both in the Patriot League conference. Harvard beat Brown this year by a touchdown; Yale beat Brown by 10 points. Harvard also beat Dartmouth by a touchdown; Yale beat Dartmouth by 40 points. Harvard's biggest margin of victory was against Cornell, whom they beat by 17 points; Yale beat Cornell by 39 points. I don't have any money on the game; but if I did, my money would be on Yale this year.

The Yale-Harvard game is as much about the T-shirt that memorialize the game as about anything else. Ivy Gate Blog ran a story a few weeks back about Harvard's game shirts (and how bad the blog reckoned they were this year). I kind of like the one about "Yale" being a four letter word. But what do I know; I applied to Cornell back when I first started looking at grad school - and being rejected by them sums up my Ivy League experience.

The blog on the game shirts now has almost 40 comments tacked on.

The Ivy Gate Blog says that the only thing lamer than Harvard's game shirts are the emails that Yale has sent out about the Harvard game shirt. Harvard voted online for their favorite shirts. Some Yalies decided to become involved and tried to get other Yalies to vote at the Harvard site for the worst shirt…

Alums from the two schools cooperate well enough to organize a telecast of the game. The game is at Yale this year - noon on Saturday, November 17.

College is hard enough. No one needs to add to the problems and work by putting up with a bad roommate…

It helps if you know what to prepare for. scholarships Dot Com recently published a list of Common Roommate Problems to watch for. Some of them are simple. There's nothing quite like getting home and finding out that your roommate has eaten of your left over pizza. But simple hygiene issues, immodest behavior, and an unwillingness to compromise can make all the little things in life seem unbearable.

In addition to the Scholarship Dot Com material, Naomi Rockler-Gladen has some good tips for how to cope with roommate online at Suite101. Check out her College Roommate Survival Guide. I know you'll find it useful…

I had a very enjoyable Saturday watching history be made in college football. For the first time in my life, the Michigan Wolverines and the Ohio State Buckeyes lost on the same day…

Having grown up with SEC football, I'm not much of a Big Ten fan. While Saturday was enjoyable in part because both Michigan and Ohio State lost, it helped that my own team, the Tennessee Volunteers, made easy work of Arkansas and seemed to play good defense for maybe the first time this year.

The Olympic Spirit Blog has some good pictures of the Ohio State game online. I liked the comment by this Illinois fan: "After years of having to suffer as a fan while Ohio State trounced my team, it is great that we ended their bid for the national championship!"

Armchairgm had a nice pun in his blog title: Ohio State Juiced by Illinois. Illini QB Juice Williams was the story of the day, throwing four touchdown passes.

For some reason it was hard to find many quotes from Buckeye fans in the blogosphere.

I watched the Michigan game during commercials breaks in my Arkansas-Tennessee match-up. One sports blog called the game between Michigan and Wisconsin irrelevant. Michigan and Ohio State still face off for the Big Ten title next week. But pride is never irrelevant - at least not in football.

Too bad they can't both lost again next week…

Dan Belzer and Duke University's independent student news paper, The Chronicle, both recently talked about the new gossip site that has Duke University in a tizzy. The site is Juicy Campus, and it has attracted attention far and wide - including a short comment from U.S. News & World Reports that calls it "repulsive, offensive, and disgusting…"

The site looks to have started on about October 22, judging from postings there. Some 22 pages of anonymous postings exist at the site. And therein lies the problems. The postings are all completely anonymous and utterly unmoderated.

Want to write about other people's real or imagined sexual proclivities and orientations? Feel free. Use their actual names if you like. Don't worry too much about your language. Heck, if you can't find anything salacious enough to make for good reading, just invent stories about your roommate or ex-girlfriend. After you post it you can change your name on the forum and reply to your own posting to confirm the truth of the lie you invented. You get the idea…

The owner of the site is a Duke graduate named Matt Ivester, according to the Chronicle. They say he was once president of a fraternity on campus.

Belzer's reaction to the site is, I suspect, typical:

On the one hand, I was shocked and horrified by the comments I was reading. On the other, I was mesmerized. One look and I was unknowingly sucked into an addiction. I wanted more. More names, more dirt, more hate. I knew it was wrong, and I couldn't morally justify adding to the hateful insanity, but I also couldn't and can't stop reading.

In an editorial the day after Belzer's column, The Chronicle calls the site "reprehensible." The editorial says that while the paper's editorial board believes in free speech, it doesn't think that such anonymous comments qualify as free speech. I would agree. Many American's seem to miss the fact that no right is absolute; at the point in time when my rights come into conflict with someone else's rights, law seems to me to require compromise. The First Amendment was intended to guarantee the free exchange of ideas, not to serve as a shield for gossips and liars.

I suspect that Ivester's site gets a lot of traffic and generates a lot of advertising revenue for him. I can see lots of 19-year-old girls checking the boards daily to see if anyone's written anything about them that their mother might see. And when Duke's moms and dads find the site, its traffic will probably increase even more.

U.S. News says that hackers have brought the site down at least once. Those sorts of attacks on the site will probably continue.

Unfortunately for Duke and the rest of the world, Belzer's conclusion is probably correct: "Knowing this school's love affair with gossip, status and elitist superiority, I don't foresee this site dying any time soon."

Several years ago I remember teaching an introductory course for would-be elementary school teachers and talking about the problems that No Child Left Behind created for rural states. Keeping certified teachers in the classroom became much harder in rural areas because of the law's requirements. One of the examples I was able to document from news sources was Wyoming…

The Casper Star Tribune is reporting that the University of Wyoming is going to take its elementary education degree and certification program statewide by offering it as a degree completion, distance learning program on the campuses of the state's seven community colleges beginning this fall.

According to the Star Tribune, "Students will take online and compressed video courses to complete the last two years of the university's education program, earning them an elementary education degree with an early childhood education endorsement."

Wyoming hopes to attract new teacher candidates into the program by making it more accessible.

Mourners gathered today to remember victims of the October fire that claimed the lives of six students from the University of South Carolina.

The Associated Press says that hundreds of mourners gathered on the campus to lay seven wreaths in memory of the fire's victims - six for the USC students and a seventh for a student from Clemson University who had accompanied the Gamecock students to the beach house where the fire took place. The students were killed in Ocean Isle Beach, N.C.

The website Sanguine et Purpure is one of the few sources I've seen that point out that all 13 residents of the beach house were members of Delta Delta Delta sorority or sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity. Six of the residents escaped the fire.

Claremont Graduate University in Southern California has announced the creation of a professorship in Mormon studies and has signed one of the Mormon world's most prominent historians to fill the spot.

The position, the Howard W. Hunter Visiting Professorship in Mormon Studies, will be filled in the Fall of 2008 by Dr. Richard Lyman Bushman. Bushman is a prominent scholar of Mormonism and of U.S. history. He is professor emeritus of early American history at Columbia University. Howard W. Hunter was the fourteenth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormon church).

According to a report by the LA Times, "Bushman is a devout Mormon - he is a patriarch, a respected elder who offers blessings, in the Mormon stake in Manhattan - who in the past year has gained national attention as a media commentator about Mormonism's role in American life and the presidential candidacy of former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, who is Mormon."

Dr. Karen Torjesen, Dean of Claremont's School of Religion, said "We consider him (Bushman) to be the single most widely known and highly regarded historian of Mormonism. We are committed to studying the full breadth of religious experience. With his broad background in American cultural and religious history, Professor Bushman will make a vitally important contribution to our mission."

Bushman's appointment and the new professorship will hopefully lead to a Mormon studies program at Claremont. Only one other secular university in America has a program in Mormon studies; Utah State began one earlier this year.

In addition to Columbia, Bushman has taught at boston university, Brown, , Harvard, the University of Delaware and Brigham Young University. Bushman's 2005 biography of Mormonism founder, Joseph Smith, won the Evans Biography Award and the Mormon History Association Best Book Award.

The blogosphere is filled with reaction to the appointment. Dr. Paul Harvey, currently part of the history department at the University of Colorado, takes a look at the place of Mormonism in U.S. history. Charles Johnson had this to say: "I couldn't be more excited. Finally, political and social diversity!"

Claremont Graduate University is part of a consortium of seven academic institutions founded on the Oxford model in 1925. It has about 2,200 students in eight academic schools.

A number of news sources in California are reporting on a state appeals court ruling there regarding the 2003 tuition hike in the University of California system. An appeals court in San Francisco has upheld a lower court ruling, stating that UCLA and UC Berkeley overcharged students in 2003 by almost $34 million.

With interest, the two institutions will have to repay some 40,000 or so students about $40 million.

In 2003, California made deep cuts to the state's higher education budget. Institutions in the University of California system passed their losses on to students - raising tuition after classes had already started. The legal problem for both UCLA and UC Berkeley was that those two institutions had previously promised not to raise tuition.

The San Francisco Sentinel reported that "The Court of Appeal said the university created an implied contract when it said on its Web site and some catalogs until 2003 that professional degree fees for students in programs such as law, medicine and business would remain constant during their enrollment."

The majority of the $40 million will go to about 9,000 students who were in various professional programs at the time. But 31,000 student in other programs will also get some of the award.

Berkeley law school student Mohammad Kashmiri filed the original suit against the University of California.

The University of Oregon has evidently decided that student privacy is more important than the record industry's desire to stop peer-to-peer downloading of copyrighted music. That's not really news, since the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has been trying since August to get the university to release the names of 17 students who've download music in a manner the RIAA says is illegal.

What is news is that, "Oregon Attorney General Hardy Myers filed court papers this week seeking to free the University of Oregon from having to identify students who illegally downloaded music." That's according to the Ashland Daily Tidings in Ashland, Oregon.

"University (officials) feel like they are being asked to do the investigation on behalf of the company when it's not really their role," according to stephanie Soden, spokeswoman for the Oregon Department of Justice quoted by the Daily Tidings.

Oregon's attorney general has made a couple of points. The 17 people named in the August suit by the RIAA are identified only by Internet addresses. Many times those addresses go back to a double occupancy dorm room - and the university has no way of determining which of the two occupants of the room downloaded the music file in question. Nor can they rule out the possibility that some student from another room on the floor happened to be in that room using the plug for Internet access when they download took place. Files downloaded over the wireless network at the school provide similar problems. The fact that a computer was logged onto the network with a particular user ID and password doesn't necessarily identify the particular culprit in the case of a specific download. The process begs the question of user ID security in a very casual computer use environment. The Privacy Digest has a good summary of the situation.

Oregon is the hot spot in the RIAA's war on downloading. The RIAA has targeted state run colleges and universities in its push to stop what it sees as illegal downloading of music files. The approach has been to identify downloaders by their IP addresses, file a lawsuit against them, present the college with the addresses, and then let the college (or other IP provider) do the work of tracking down the individual with access to that IP address. The college turns over the names and Internet users get served their subpoenas to come to court for the lawsuit. So far Oregon is the only state to refuse to comply with that process.

Oregon is also the scene of a class action lawsuit against the RIAA.

With scandal swirling in the air on campus and the president on a leave of absence while accusations against him and his family are sorted out, Oral Roberts University seems to be preparing for a fire sale of sorts to reduce the college's debt of more than $50 million.

We first reported on the scandal at ORU back on October 8th. Then in mid-October the university's president, Richard Roberts, stepped away from his office and took a temporary leave of absence so that the institution's trustees could try and sift through the accusations of financial improprieties by Roberts and sexual misconduct by his wife, Lindsay Roberts. Richard and Lindsay have denied the charges. But a lawsuit filed by three former faculty members is pending and the IRS is investigating whether ORU violated it's non-profit status by becoming involved in a local political campaign.

In the midst of all of this, ORU has decided to try and sell the campus-based radio Station, KGEB, according to one local news outlet.

According to Tulsa World, ORU has hired the Washington, D.C., law firm of Miller & Chevalier Chartered to investigate the various allegations and the law firm is being supported by a Texas accounting firm, Pickens, Snodgrass, Koch & Co., P.C.